The slow burn of anomie infects the soul of Sunny Fernando, a baffled, silent drifter in the stream of his own life. At times it is a Hamlet-style paralysis, sometimes it is an inability to squeeze time and life in a ball and send it rolling towards some overwhelming end with determination; at others it is his haunting by a past full of holes. Amid all this, an event when he was 16 and living in an affluent, gated suburb of Manila stands out as a 'moment of being' - a cricket match organised by his father, Lester, to recreate a little bit of his former home, Ceylon. That game and the bewitching presence of Tina Navaratnam, cool and beautiful and a crack hand with a bat, occupy Sunny's innermost heart.

His later life will be given over to seeking out the wholeness of that day in an effort to shore up his frangible exile's life in London, where he studies engineering but drifts into other things, his heart not wholly in any of them. He meets fellow immigrants, uneasily trying to position himself in their new worlds, but has limited success, unsure of 'what to hang on to, what to let go, what to give, what to take'. Meanwhile the Phillippines come under the talons of Marcos, while Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, slides into civil war. Sunny meets Clara, falls in love with her and fathers a son, Mikey.

Until this point, Romesh Gunesekera's fourth novel, The Match, is a quiet study of rootlessness and home-making. It is a shock that the book reverses this and goes awry with Mikey's birth in 1986. The drift of life is difficult to catch truthfully without the narrative sharing the same indirection and, as Sunny's life gets caught in its own solipsistic eddies, the story seems to chase its tail endlessly.

In an effort to galvanise the writing, Gunesekera becomes overt about tectonic shifts of politics that had been noises off. The depredations of the Tamil Tigers bother Sunny. His father dies, the truth about his mother's death when he was eight continues to haunt him, his partnership with Clara becomes more attenuated, he longs 'for something that goes to the heart of everything'.

There is now a damaging mingling of registers - sarcastic observations with bad jokes, failed comedy with social criticism. The effect of phrases such as 'conversations had to be punctuated by ... kutchi-coos and pipi-poos flying between caged playpens and tilted high chairs', a description of Clara's early motherhood and Sunny's own passion for photography as 'while she clucked, he clicked', all achieve a bathos damaging to a novel that purports to be about the minute fallings away of life.

Eventually, it is through two cricket matches, one between Sri Lanka and England, and the culminating one, a one-day game between Sri Lanka and India, that Sunny gropes his way towards a kind of redemption. Tina makes a surprise appearance, crude nationalisms are rebuked, photography holds out the possibility of salvation and the slow trickling away of Sunny's life is revealed to him, allowing him to staunch its flow. But after so much narrative drift and procrastination, this unexpected hope is dismayingly unconvincing.